In his last speech to Labour Party conference in 2006 Tony Blair said this:

"10 years ago, I would have described re-linking the basic state pension with earnings as old Labour. By 2012, we aim to do it. 10 years ago, if you'd have asked me to put environmental restrictions on business, I would be horrified. Today, I'm calling for it. I would have bulked at restrictions to advertise junk food to children. Today I say that unless a voluntary code works, we will legislate for it."

He was right then and we are right now. Market failure in tough times should not simply be shrugged off. What’s needed is a hard-headed dose of common sense, not ideology that lets the British people suffer. I’ve not seen many British commentators describing Angela Merkel’s interventions in the economy as 1980s socialism.

Although the media only really woke up to the populist dimensions of Ed Miliband’s One Nation approach this week, it has been a part of his political armoury for some time. The discursive construction of ‘the people’ versus powerful vested interests is a familiar one in politics, left and right, and it has been used repeatedly by Labour leaders down the years, including Tony Blair (as Ben Jackson recounts). Obama gave a masterclass in the controlled use of populist discourse in his re-election campaign last year, painting Romney as an out-of-touch, asset-stripping plutocrat on the wrong side of the Main St vs Wall St divide. Its appeal to Labour is obvious.

But it carries a risk. The tension at the heart of Labour’s electoral strategy is between radicalism and reassurance; between offering the electorate substantial economic change to transform their living standards, and reassuring them that it will manage the economy competently so as not to threaten their family fortunes. This is mirrored in an intellectual tension on the left between those who argue that the British economy is structurally weak and in need of radical surgery, and those who think that its pre-crash performance was fundamentally sound and that an expansive macro-stance will put it back on track (Gavin Kelly and I have addressed that question and Duncan Weldon’s piece is excellent). Ed Miliband is in the former camp. He has spent the last three years arguing for a ‘responsible capitalism’. Tellingly, he punctuated his speech this week by drawing the attention of his audience to the fact that the ‘most important thing he would say’ was that the link between growth and rising prosperity for working people had been broken, and that only substantial economic reform could restore it.

He also makes a point that should worry Twigg.

One coda to the events of the last few days. Education barely registered at the Labour conference or in Miliband’s speech. In part, that reflects the times. Wearily familiar evocations of educational aspiration and social mobility fall on deaf ears when the electorate can barely pay its bills. But education is too important to become a footnote in the left’s lexicon and it has come to something when the best that can be said of Labour’s policy stance is that nobody knows anything much about it. David Cameron will exploit that weakness in his conference speech next week, as he did last year. Labour has already ceded its leadership on education amongst the commentariat. It will be in greater trouble if the public follows.

Yet here we have, from the hatchet man himself, plenty of evidence that Brown was the opposite of an innocent bystander. McBride describes one occasion when Brown instructs him to leak at a European summit. "Be careful – don't do it with any British guys." When one of McBride's schemes goes wrong, Brown asks: "Is all that business over with?" When Brown fears that a McBride leak will upset Buckingham Palace, he rings up at five in the morning screaming: "How can you do this to me? This is the Queen! THE QUEEN!" On yet another occasion when McBride has caused mayhem, Brown asks: "Why do you do this stuff?" Why? Because McBride believed that is what Brown wanted from him. After all, if Brown didn't want it, he would have sacked him.

It was Brown who created and presided over the brutish, treacherous, gangland culture in which his hitman operated. Even McBride laughs at his former capo's "comically irrational outbursts" and propensity to "unleash a tremendous volley of abuse, usually just a stream of unconnected swear words". Then there is Brown's default response to things going wrong – which is to blame someone else. "Blair!", roars Brown about a self-inflicted blunder. "Blair made me give him the figures. Why has he done this to me?"

The real villain of the period was not McBride. He was just the vicious little monkey. The organ grinder was Gordon Brown, the man who prated about his "moral compass" while allowing his smear merchant to trash the characters of colleagues. In the end, the reputation it most fouled was his own. Which is a sort of justice.

Along the way [McBride] mastered the art of what he describes as “lying without lying” – the ability to obfuscate, divert attention and sow false trails without telling an untruth. But the fact is that he did lie, often enough, to promote the interests of his hero. His book could easily be subtitled “my struggle with truth”, because he poses – but doesn’t quite answer – the question that hangs over modern political life: When is it acceptable to lie? Late in the book, he explains his counterintuitive decision to start telling journalists the truth on election nights, about the results and the likely outcome. The more he told the truth, the more he came to be regarded as a reliable source of accurate information. And the more reliable he became, the easier it was for him to tell a lie, because no one suspected him. Telling the truth in order to become a better liar is a crude but accurate distillation of his working method.

When Grayling replaced Ken Clarke as Justice Secretary, it signalled a hardening of the Tory position on a host of issues, most notably the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights. Grayling declares that ‘the whole situation now is wholly and utterly unacceptable’. His view is that they were ‘never designed to do the kind of things they are doing today’. He complains that the European Court has ‘an almost unlimited jurisprudence to decide what it thinks are human rights matters and the envelope is being pushed wider and wider and wider’.

But condemning the current situation is the easy part; working out what to do about it the hard part. Grayling promises that he’ll set out his answer in ‘draft legislation which we will publish later in the year, next year’.

He won’t be drawn on the specifics of what will be in this bill. He wants to see what the working group he has set up with former Tory leader Michael Howard on it suggests. But he’s clear that: ‘We have to curtail the role of the European Court of Human Rights in the UK, get rid of and replace Labour’s Human Rights Act. We have to make sure that there is a proper balance between rights and responsibilities in law.’

Crucially, he adds, ‘I want to see our Supreme Court being supreme again. I think people want to see the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom being in the United Kingdom and not in Strasbourg.’ That last sentence is the heaviest hint yet that the Tories will back leaving the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights. Without that, the Strasbourg court will always be supreme.

2.35pm BST

This is what Tony Blair had to say about Ed Miliband's conference speech. I missed it last night, but the FT's Jim Pickard has put the quotes in a blog.

I’m not really going to comment on Ed’s conference speech. It seemed to go down very well with people and was excellently delivered, I think….

But I’m not going to comment on the policy.

From that I think it's safe to assume he's not wildly keen on the energy price freeze idea ...

• Lawyers representing adults and children with disabilities have won permission to challenge the legality of the "bedroom tax" in the court of appeal. As the Press Association reports, an appeal judge has ruled ten test cases should be heard, as they raise issues of public importance. The cases are said to illustrate the serious impact of the regulations on disabled people up and down the country in social housing.

• The Audit Commission has revealed that one council in three is now earning more money through charges for services like parking and school meals than council tax. The Audit Commission, responsible for protecting the public purse, found that councils made £10.2bn in 2011/12 by charging for rubbish, funerals and other domestic services. Money brought in by supplementary service charges helped fund 20% of overall service spending by district councils and 9% of the overall spending by single-tier and county councils in 2011/12. Although nationally, money received through such services amounted to less than half the sum brought in through council tax, the public spending watchdog found that one in three (32%) districts were collecting more money through these additional services than they were through council tax. This was also true for one in five (21%) London boroughs.

• Labour has claimed that the work programme is "on its knees" after the release of new figures showing that, after two years, more than three quarters of participants have failed to find a long-term job. Here are the figures (pdf) and here is an extract.

More recent intakes attain a higher proportion of Job Outcome payments than earlier intakes with the same duration of support. 13.0% of June 2012 intake achieved a Job Outcome payment within 12 months (8.5% for June 2011 intake).

Early monthly intakes continue to attain Job Outcome payments the longer they spend on the Programme. By 24 months, 22.5% of June 2011 intake achieved a Job Outcome payment.

Job outcome payments are paid when someone has found a job lasting at least six months. Liam Byrne, the shadow work and pensions secretary, said the scheme was failing.

The work programme is now on its knees. It's failed over a million people and is so bad that even after two years help, eight out of ten don't get steady jobs, and nine out of ten disabled people don’t find work at all. The work programme doesn't work.

I want to apologise and say sorry to Stuart Holmes, who is a passionate campaigner and well known to everyone who attends party conferences and was perfectly entitled to do as he did on Tuesday in trying to get attention for his causes. It was totally out of character for me to react to him in the way I did.

12.30pm BST

The Press Association has just snapped this.

Iain Dale, the publisher of former spin doctor Damian McBride, has received a police caution after admitting common assault over a scuffle with a protester during a live television interview in Brighton, Sussex Police said.

One of the Conservatives’ most powerful and generous donors is at the centre of a political and financial storm after City watchdogs savaged his firm for its role in the Libor interest-rate fixing scandal.

Icap, the company founded by the former Tory treasurer Michael Spencer, has been fined a total of £55m by regulators on both sides of the Atlantic – £14m in Britain and £41m in the US – while three former employees responsible for the misconduct have been charged in New York with conspiracy to commit fraud and wire fraud. The New Zealand national Darrell Read and Britons Daniel Wilkinson and Colin Goodman face up to 30 years in prison if convicted.

The news is particularly uncomfortable for the Conservatives as it emerged on the same day that George Osborne announced he had launched a legal challenge against the European Union’s planned cap on bankers’ bonuses ...

Labour MPs have demanded that the Conservatives either return Mr Spencer’s party donations – which have reached almost £5m – or give them to charity. Though he stepped down as Treasurer in 2010, Mr Spencer remains close to many senior Conservatives and gave £76,000 to the party as recently as March.

The Labour leader was prepared to reverse a plan for an all-women shortlist in Burnley so that Tony Blair’s former spin doctor could stand in his home town constituency.

Mr Campbell said that he was flattered and tempted by the offer, but he had decided against a return to frontline politics.

Labour is using all-women shortlists in more than 50 seats to boost the number of its female MPs. It is confident of regaining Burnley, which it lost to the Liberal Democrats in 2010.

“Burnley was one of the seats around the country that the party planned for an all-woman shortlist,” Mr Campbell, who supports Burnley FC, said. “Ed offered to un-pick it if I fancied running for it, and I thought long and hard. But in the end I decided against it.”

Mr Mitchell was asked in an interview with socialite Jemima Kahn in the New Statesman magazine how the “Tories can deal with the threat from Ukip.”

He replied: “They are mostly our cousins and we want them back.” He was also asked by Miss Khan “how would the country look different if David Davis – whose leadership campaign you ran in 2005 – had won”.

11.45am BST

Lord Mandelson may not have much support in the Labour party (see 9.20am), but the rightwing press certainly share his reservations about Ed Miliband's plan to freeze energy prices. Here's what they are saying this morning.

Mr Miliband displays a worrying inability to understand how markets work. He is critical of the energy companies for what he regards as their profiteering, but their margins are slender. That low profit margin is the reason that energy companies pay good dividends. Investors who can expect modest capital growth will, understandably, demand a stream of income as the cost of their capital. Indeed, the retail arms of some energy companies, EDF for example, actually loses money.

It is also not the energy companies that set the price. The world price of energy is high. In fact British energy is among the cheapest in Europe, though we have high bills because we use more gas central heating and because of our inefficient homes. The Climate Change Secretary who setsevere targets for decarbonisation, therefore loading these costs on to the energy companies and pushing up the price of energy, was one Ed Miliband. “Red Ed”, as the tabloid press call him, has either forgotten what Green Ed once did, or now regrets it.

Labour says that France is proof that European countries have managed to set prices successfully. There, a regulator gives permission for energy companies to raise prices according to an inflation-linked formula, allowing EDF, for instance, to raise prices by just 5 per cent this year and 5 per cent next year. But EDF is mostly state-owned, and runs a virtual monopoly in the residential market – as water companies do in Britain.

Analysts believe the most likely effect of a price freeze would be a delay in companies making any investment decisions. Britain is in dire need of new power stations to replace the old gas-fired ones that are being mothballed. According to the Government, there needs to be £110 billion of private sector investment between now and 2020 to meet all our green energy targets.

“Labour would be naive in the extreme to think that industry can absorb the cost of a price freeze, while at the same time making significant new investments,” Mr Atherton says. “Even if Labour don’t win the election, it will stop anyone making any decisions. It kills investment stone dead.”

• The Sun in a leader says Miliband's plan is flawed.

We understand how popular his temporary freeze on bills will be among people unable to see beyond the soaring charges they struggle to pay to energy giants whose painful price hikes appear out of control.

But the plan has more holes than a Swiss cheese.

And the Financial Times, which probably does not see itself as part of the rightwing press, is also critical. This is what it says in its editorial (subscription).

Mr Miliband is right to ask whether the market is working as it should. Ofgem, the energy regulator, has found that bills respond faster when wholesale prices rise than when they fall. Collusion is a possible explanation. Still, this accounts for at most a fraction of the increase in electricity prices, which are among the lowest in Europe despite a 20 per cent surge since 2007. Rising input costs account for much of the increase over the past two years. Green energy policies have also added costs. Further rises were inevitable as plant shutdowns eroded the capacity surplus built up during the nationalised era.

Nor is it clear what a price freeze would achieve in practice. How much it would cost depends on what happens to input prices, which can neither be predicted nor controlled. Utilities may swallow temporary losses – although if costs rise dramatically, public subsidy might be needed.

Instead of trafficking in populist gimmickry, Mr Miliband might more usefully spell out how Labour would recast the energy market. Without a clear framework that investors can rely on, urgently needed power stations will not be built. The first step is to decide between the incompatible objectives of cutting prices and cutting carbon emissions. A competitive market should then be given an appropriate economic incentive such as a carbon tax, and left to find the most efficient way of meeting the chosen goal.

11.37am BST

Caroline Flint's interview on Mandelson - Summary

Caroline Flint, the shadow energy secretary, has just been on BBC News responding to Lord Mandelson's comments. Here are the main point.

• Flint said Lord Mandelson had "financial interests in energy companies". She suggested this might have influenced his comments.

I know Lord Mandelson has financial interests in energy companies. I don't know if he's just speaking to them. But I'm speaking up for consumers and businesses [who] are going to be helped by Labour's policies.

According to the FT's Jim Pickard, Flint is only half right about this.

Jim Pickard (@PickardJE)

Global Counsel (Mandelson's firm): "Our work for energy clients is not in the UK. None of the Big Six that are affected are clients."

• She suggested that Mandelson was out of touch with the public's concerns because he was too rich to have to worry about energy bills.

Now, Lord Mandelson may not have to worry about his energy bills. But a lot of consumers and businesses do.

• She said Mandelson and his New Labour allies did something similar to Ed Miliband by introducing a windfall tax.

Lord Mandelson, of course, was the architect of the windfall [tax] on the utility companies to fund the New Deal in 1997 when we won. That cost £5bn nearly 20 years ago. We are talking about a temporary price freeze to help hard-pressed businesses and consumers around the country while we get our reforms through.

• She said the energy companies could afford the price freeze.

We've looked at the bumper profits these companies have made over the last few years, with something like 50% of their profits going into the dividend, which I have to say hits back at the idea that profits are going into investment.

She also said that the energy companies planned their purchase of power up to four years in advance, and that they hedged to protect against price fluctuations.

• She said that Labour was offering the energy companies certainty.

Ed Miliband made clear in his letter yesterday we are open to discussions with the energy companies about how we reset this market, how we make sure we support them on investment. Because the one thing above all that they ask for is certainty. And they haven't had that under this government.

Caroline Flint Photograph: /BBC News

11.02am BST

The number of children in care being adopted has risen 15% in the last year, the Department for Education says. Here's an extract from their news release.

Figures published today by the Department for Education show that almost 4,000 children in care were adopted in 2012-13 - an increase of 15% on the previous year.

The annual Looked After Children Statistical First Release show that 3,980 children were adopted between April 2012 and March 2013, up from 3,470 the previous year.

This is higher than in any year since 1992, when comparable records began.

The Today programme interviewed him this morning. Here are the main points.

• Higgins said it was essential to have cross-party support for HS2.

I think the absolutely crucial thing on the Olympics ... is that it was bipartisan and I did meet with the Chancellor last week and I said ‘there’s only one thing I really need on this project, this has to be bipartisan, you can’t have this as a political football, it’s too crucial for the nation’. Therefore, as I did in the Olympics, I had the right to brief opposition and government both at a local and national level. I've asked for the same right on this project.

• He said he would be meeting Ed Balls, who expressed doubts about HS2 in his speech to the Labour conference, in the next few weeks. The meeting was supposed to be about rail, not HS2, he said. But he implied he would raise HS2.

• He said the Olympics were originally unpopular.

People forget, I started [on the Olympics] late 2005, 2006 there wasn’t a single bit of positive media coverage/ It was all about ‘this’ll never be done, the budget’s ridiculous, it can’t be done, we’ll be embarrassed about what’s going to happen about it’. It took about two years for the first green shoots to emerge saying ‘maybe this will happen’.

• He said Britain needed HS2 because in the future the existing network will not be able to cope.

I think the case to make is ‘what’s the alternative?’ because if we don’t do this it’s patching up for the next 50 years an ageing Victorian railway system that is operating at a capacity way over than it was designed for.

The key issue is setting out the alternative, because the biggest thing to understand is while we do have the safest railway in Europe we also have the oldest railway in Europe ... It’s essential for economic growth in this country to have a proper, modern railway. The thought that we could be living with this railway in 30-40 years time is for me a very difficult thing for me to comprehend.

Labour reaction to Lord Mandelson's comments

Here's what some Labour figures are saying on Twitter about Lord Mandelson's comments.

I haven't found one Labour tweet supporting Mandleson. Interestingly, the criticism doesn't just come from the left. Even Alastair Campbell, a fellow New Labour Blairite, says he disagrees. He interprets Ed Miliband's plan not as a shift to the left, but as a shift to the consumer. It's like the New Deal, he says. The New Deal, a work programme, is a good parallel because it was also funded by a levy on the privatised utilities, the windfall tax. Miliband's plan is similar to a levy, because it will impose a cost. But the windfall tax was worth £5bn. Miliband's will only cost the industry £4.5bn, according to some estimates, so I suppose you could argue that Ed Miliband is being less radical than Tony Blair. (To be fair, though, the parallel is not exact because the windfall tax covered a range of privatised utilities, not just energy companies.)

From Alastair Campbell

Alastair Campbell (@campbellclaret)

Peter M wrong re energy policy being shift to left. It is putting consumer first v anti competitive force. More New Deal than old Labour

The Labour conference is over, and the caravan has left Brighton, but the controversy about Ed Miliband’s plan to freeze gas and electricty prices is still raging. If anything, it’s intensifying.

Lord Mandelson, the former business secretary and champion of New Labour’s pro-marketism, is the latest person to intervene. As Patrick Wintour reveals in today’s Guardian, Mandelson fears that Miliband’s announcement could create the impression that the party is going backwards.

Mandelson fears his own carefully crafted legacy of “industrial activism” built up during his two years as business secretary is under threat, and that Miliband’s party conference speech in which he made the energy price pledge was driven by politics as much as economics.

He said: “At the business department I tried to move on from the conventional choice in industrial policy between state control and laissez-faire. The industrial activism I developed showed that intervention in the economy – government doing some of the pump priming of important markets, sectors and technologies – was a sensible approach.”

But he added that as a result of Miliband’s speech “I believe that perceptions of Labour policy are in danger of being taken backwards.”

Today I will be covering reaction to what Mandelson said, and all the other reaction to the Miliband plan.

We’re in the lull between the Labour conference and the Conservative conference and at Westminster it seems quiet. But, as usual, I’ll also be covering all the breaking political news as well as looking at the papers and bringing you the best politics from the web. I’ll post a lunchtime summary at around 1pm and another in the afternoon.